Don't Know to Laugh or Cry

Op-Ed pages are interesting; articles on them can run from agreeable to infuriating with detours at confusion and unintended humour. What is always consistent though is over-simplicity. It is the nature of the genre so one should not make too much of it. Sometimes though one encounters an ‘Op’ that is so simplistic and confused that makes reaction difficult. You cannot be angry at it because that would give it too much weight and importance. You cannot make fun of it because it is hard to make fun of a joke, however unintended. You cannot pretend to agree with it because that would take inhuman mental discipline. You can only point it out and it will embarrass itself. One such article appeared on the Financial Post. Terence Corcoran got hot under his collar with the Conservative government’s apparent agreement with David Suzuki’s assessment that Canada is failing in environmental policies and needs to do a lot better. It is dangerous to write when one is still hot under the collar. Corcoran’s argument against “Suzukiism” seems to be: how dare they put our great country below Mexico! This may be patriotic but hardly an argument. The argument behind it is that Canada is more prosperous then Mexico so of course we pollute more, there is nothing wrong about that; to say we should pollute less is to say we should become the backward lazy dirty Mexicans. This logic is almost beautiful in itself perfect roundness: we are rich so we pollute and we must not stop polluting for that is what make us rich. It is hard to argue for pollution and Corcoran made a wholehearted go at it. Unfortunately, it makes absolutely no sense. If the rich pollute far more than the poor, should the rich not try harder to pollute less? I would hate to think that Canada is prosperous because we pollute. And since pollution is a by-product of our prosperity, should we not shoulder a heavier burden in lowering pollution? If “Suzukiism” blames pollution on prosperity, and I am not sure that it does, the counter argument should be that pollution is not a necessary by-product of prosperity. It is shocking to see such an article on the newspaper. Granted, the Financial Post a single issue paper, still there should at least be a little hint of intellectual vigor from its columnist. I do not read the National/Financial Post but it bleeds into my local paper’s Op/Ed page. And that is a good example of pollution from the rich.